Maxine Hong Kingston
Recipient of the 2008 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation
Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey and others, received the 2008 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation on November 19, 2008. Earlier in the year, the L.A. Times gave her the Kirsch Award, which honors a living author with a substantial connection to the American West whose contribution to American letters deserves special recognition. She was the award's 28th recipient.
Kingston lives in Oakland with her husband, Earll, where she is a senior lecturer emerita at the UC Berkeley and directs the Veterans Writing Group project. The National Book Foundation writes, "Kingston has employed a range of literary styles and stories in her work to create a startling new approach to immigrant memoir and fiction and influence two generations of American writers."
Maxine Hong Kingston was born on October 27, 1940 in Stockton, California. Kingston's first language was Say Yup, a dialect of Cantonese. She grew up surrounded by other immigrants from her father's village, and the storytelling she heard as a child influenced her later writing. By the age of nine, her progress in English enabled her to write poems in her new language, and though she was a gifted storyteller like her mother, she preferred the solitary task of writing.
An extremely bright student, she won eleven scholarships that allowed her to attend the University of California at Berkeley. Kingston began as an engineering major, but she soon switched to English literature. She received her B.A. degree in 1962 and her teaching certificate in 1965. In 1962, she married Earll Kingston, an actor, and they moved to Hawaii where they both taught for the next ten years.
In 1976, while Kingston was teaching creative writing at the Mid-Pacific Institute, a private school, she published her first book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. One reviewer, Michael T. Malloy, described the book as having an exotic setting but dealing with the same subjects as mainstream American feminist literature, specifically the "Me and Mom" genre. Other reviewers were surprised by its fresh subject matter and style, and they sang the praises of this poetic, fierce, delicate, original novel/memoir. Kingston strove for a Chinese rhythm to her voice, a typical Chinese-American speech, and rich imagery; her first book was a great success. In the end of Woman Warrior, her shy girl character finds resolution as she breaks female silence and inherits an oral tradition that she carries on as a written tradition.
Kingston's second book, China Men, published in 1980, was a companion to Warrior Woman and received more controversial reviews. Several sinologists complained that Kingston reconstructed myths that are only remotely connected to original Chinese legends and that her pieces don't accurately portray high culture. Kingston responded to this criticism by explaining that she is not trying to represent Chinese culture, she is simply trying to portray her own experiences. She points to William Carlos Williams as one of the influences of China Men.
In 1987, Kingston published a collection of twelve prose selections, Hawaii One Summer. In 1988, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, a picaresque novel set in the San Francisco area during the 1960s, was published. The protagonist of this novel, Wittman Ah Sing, is a fifth-generation Chinese-American, and like many of Kingston's characters, he struggles to escape racism as he grows and questions the world around him. Reviews of this novel again were mixed, but critics seem to have had stronger reactions against this book than against China Men.
For Maxine Hong Kingston, writing has been central in her life. "My writing is an ongoing function, like breathing or eating," she explains. "I have this habit of writing things down. Anything. And then some of it falls into place as in these two books [China Men and Woman Warrior]" . She admires the changes a storyteller can implement when he or she tells the same tale many times, and in her work, she tries to retain this freedom to change a story's interpretation by guarding ambiguity in the static writing. Doubt is a part of every story, not certainty, and that is part of what makes her writing unique.
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